Net zero, carbon neutral and science based greenhouse gas targets

hi everyone welcome to uh the first mini series of the uh the mpa's sustainability ambassador networks lunchtime webinar series my name is george baker and i work in the sustainability and climate change team at wsp and we provide management and consolidate service to the built natural environment and i should be sharing the first series run by wsp so the aim of these webinars is to provide a quick pit stop and some of the engaging sustainability of hot topics today and we will run one of these a month and where each will be about 30 minutes long allowing around 15 minutes for q a's at the end now you'll be muted during this webinar so please feel free to send through questions in the comments section and we will try to address as many of these as possible in the q a at the end this will also be very interactive so um do openmenti.com on your smartphone or browser and use the menu code display on the screen so today's webinar will be run by mark mike hardesty on net zero carbon neutral and science-based ghgs mike leads wsp uk's infrastructure carbon footprint can surface and also manages our corporate ghg emissions reporting wsp uk has committed to being carbon neutral by 2025 and mike has developed both the carbon management plan and carbon offsetting plan for this but is now supporting the development of the company's net zero strategy as a consultant mike has led carbon footprints of diverse activities such as rail and highways engineering projects and mike's work on the great western electrification program led to wsb being finalists in the eddy sustainability leaders award 2017 the nece 100 awards and also won the client network rail and green apple award so without further ado i shall pass over to the safe hands welcome guru mike to talk you through the latest on net zero and carbon neutrality thanks everyone for um joining um i'm sat at home whereas uh taylor is sat in another office and is actually going to drive the the slides and both the slides that we're looking at now and we've also got some interactive mentee um questions um to uh to make sure this is a a bit more of a to and fro um between me and uh and you the audience so taylor if you could flick onto the next powerpoint slide for me please thanks so we'll be covering the uh the three topics there carbon neutral net zero and science based target says advertise we'll also be taking um deeper dives into a couple of related topics and that's those two topics are scope 3 emissions and carbon removal because we can't really do justice to net zero without discussing those in a bit more detail and to make sure that mentee is working i was wondering if you can please open another browser or use your mobile phone to go to mentee.com and then enter that seven digit number that you can see and taylor if you can in a couple of seconds once people have scribbled down that web link and the number 9977 we're going to just ask you to input a little bit of information about yourselves partly just to check that the the system is working so we we already have some people logging in marvelous a lot of consultants out there a lot of public sector and some manufacturing good good okay well we'll let that settle down um just for a little while um before we flick to the uh the next question which is just a little bit more about your um your experience so for those that have filled that in thank you very much taylor if you can just give an idea of your level of understanding that helps me pitch this at the um at the right kind of level so i can explain some of the concepts such as scope 1 scope 2 scope 3 in more detail or less detail so i guess we've got people somewhere in the middle of a limited understanding and good understanding okay good good all right um thanks letting that settle down i think taylor if we could flick back to the powerpoint slides and then go um go ahead and to the next slide wonderful thank you very much so for those of you that are members of iema and that's the institute of environmental management assessment you may have seen this in your transform magazine back in march 2020 clarifying net zero confusion arises when net zero is used synonymously with carbon neutral is it question mark so you can flick on to the next slide for me please taylor and then this just came out in the current version of transform magazine um which uh which i'm sure you'll read avidly many councils companies and industries have pledged to become net zero or zero carbon and they might have signed to a pledge to net zero or transformed to net zero and says that the exact definition of these terms can vary so quite a lot of confusion out there but things are beginning to shake down from a net zero point of view but still people might say well i now know what net zero is but i still don't understand how that's different from carbon neutral so that's essentially what we're going to try and get to the bottom of on this session so if you could go to the next slide please thanks so i'm just going to do a little canter over carbon neutral because it's a concept that's been around for a little while now and it's pretty well defined either that has a something similar to a british standard a pass something called paz 2060 and we're going to have a little look at that now taylor if you can flick on so this pas 2060 which is how to demonstrate that your carbon neutral came out in 2014 and it helps organizations define carbon neutrality either for the company or for an event or for a product or a service and several companies have have used it to try and demonstrate and announce that they're carbon neutral such as marks and spencers my local shell garage even entices you to drive carbon neutral though don't they claim to be pas 2060 certified um so you can see the uh the pas includes a definition of what they think carbon neutral means which is during a specified period there has been no net increase in the global emissions of ghgs which means greenhouse gases as a result of the ghgs associated with the subject so a fairly dry definition but let's see then what needs to happen if you are to be a carbon neutral company for example thanks taylor so we start by defining the subject are we def is it for a product or a service or the entire company is it for just the uk part of the company or global and then um you'll go through what is for for many a fairly um regular carbon footprinting exercise so you need to account for all your scope 1 emissions and by scope 1 essentially we mean fossil fuels that that are burnt on your property that you you own so typically this might be um in an office environment boilers that you you own to heat the property uh scope 2 emissions which typically will be electricity and then a bit of a catch all here any scope one two or three emissions source estimated to be material i.e greater than one percent of the total footprint so scope three emissions are all the other mish emissions and we'll be coming to uh the next slide which just hold on a second we'll um show you what those scope 3 emissions are so so we start by putting a carbon footprint together basically um scope 1 and scope 2 people have been publishing and reporting on for many years scope 3 as well but not as comprehensively so my next mente question which is meant to question three is how many scope three categories are there according to the ghg protocol very good settling down okay so the consensus is around 10 or 12. 3 emission categories okay all right reasonable guesses um taylor if you can flick back to the the powerpoint and move on to the the next slide which shows the greenhouse gas protocols view of scope 3. so you can see there's actually 15 anybody got 15 pat on the back of which eight are upstream and seven are downstream so very often um the scope threes that a lot of companies will publish um com footprint for as is business travel maybe waste perhaps employee commuting and the others are are less well reported and downstream less well reported again so i ikea and microsoft have been reporting their use of sold products but they are kind of in the minority for um for doing that and part of the reason for that is that when the ghg protocol was first published which i think was around 2004 that kind of time scope 3 was actually seen as optional so um a bit like the carbon that the pas standard where you had to do all your your scope 1 scope 2 um scope 3 was optional at the time it's no longer the case but i think it's you know that sort of built in a bit of a a lag that the companies are um less inclined to to publish their their scope threes so that brings me on to the next mentee question which is which scope three categories does your organization currently um publish or report on now i haven't put all of them in there but there's a good cross-section of upstream and then i've lumped all the downstream together in the right hand right hand bucket if you like good business travel is one of the most commonly um reported um and and waste many have to report on their waste anyway so uh they have the data to hand for that um so hence waste is quite high employee commuting looks like it's coming out the next highest which is good to see because that's obviously that's very often quite large and often doesn't go well reported good okay that's very interesting yeah business travel always comes out um pretty high i guess because uh travel firms can can often provide decent data on that too okay could we flick back to the powerpoint please and yeah move on to the next slide so having put your carbon footprint together which you you do normally just by multiplying activity data so that might be the kilowatts hours or the miles driven by an emission factor for your electricity or for your gas or for your mode of transport you get your your emissions footprint and then you need to develop a carbon management plan to demonstrate how you're going to reduce your emissions and uh and monitor those emissions um and set targets which can either be an absolute emissions target or an intensity emissions target so the absolute there is tons of co2 but an emissions intensity might be tons of co2 per full-time equivalent or per million dollars turnover whatever it might be okay um it doesn't critically i just might just point out here that the pas doesn't specify what carbon reduction targets need to be set so it doesn't say you know 10 or 50 percent or or whatever um that that's not in the past right if you could flick to the next slide please taylor so finally the organization makes carbon reductions and assuming that it can't reduce the carbon emissions to zero which very few will be able to do they need to purchase carbon offsets to cover those residual emissions whatever's left so as an example mark marks and spencers self-certified to pass 2060 they published an annual statement saying what their emissions were and what scope and they bought 158 000 tons of carbon credits over the period 2018 to 2019 so in buying offsets there is um quite a difference between those um offsets on the market um and i just took some examples from the u united nations carbon offset platform there anything from hydro power to cooking stoves but the one that i've highlighted in red is to me quite different from the others because the one in red is actually going to remove carbon from the atmosphere reforestation deforestation but the others look to avoid emissions being pumped into the atmosphere in the first place so if you're putting up a wind turbine that's avoiding say a coal an oil or a gas fired power station emitting emissions but it won't actually take any emissions out of the out of the atmosphere and this is a bit of a key point when we come to talk about net zero which we're we're going to do in a second but just to point out that from a carbon neutral point of view um there's there's no distinction between avoidance offsets and and removals offsets okay flicking over to the next slide then please so following the paris agreement to limit global warming to well below two degrees c and to pursue efforts to limit um the increase to 1.5 degrees which is was i think 2015 ratified in 2016 or thereabouts the ipcc which is the intergovernmental panel on climate change issued a special report in 2018 about how the world might limit global warming to 1.5 degrees c and the advantages of of doing that rather than well below two degrees c and it modeled um pathways which um if if you want to have limited overshoot of 1.5 degrees centigrade temperature rise or no no overshoot of that temperature rise then global co2 emissions had to decline to net zero by around 20 50. so that's where this 2050 which is often talked about comes from and the net zero issue so off the back of that so that came out in 2018 if we could flick over to the um to the next slide please and then in the uk in 2019 the um ccc the committee on climate change published its assessment of reducing uk emissions to net zero by 2050 um and it includes its definition of net zero there so emissions um means that the total of active removals from the atmosphere offsets any remaining emissions from the rest of the economy so the idea is that we will shrink our emissions as far as we can to 2050 but there is bound to be some remaining emissions which must be offset so it says um under the little brown barrels on the right hand side and those remaining emissions are largely coming from aviation which is about a third of the remaining emissions and agriculture which is about another third of the remaining emissions i will cover how those emissions might be removed from the atmosphere a little bit later in the in the presentation so if we could move on to the next slide please so i think that i said that report came out in um in 2019 i think it was early in 2019 and then off the the back of that in um middle of 2019 the uk government changed its um commitment to become a net zero economy by 2050. and you can see that that's in line with france and new zealand i think the eu is um working on a similar ambition but other countries have have gone for for earlier earlier targets okay flicking to the next slide thank you very much and there was a lot of activity last year with many local authorities i think there's in excess of 60 or even 70 percent of local authorities have now committed to being net zero but you can see lots of different time scales so 2030 is quite a typical one few 2050 oxfordshire very ambitious at 2020 and given that we didn't really have a an agreed um definition of what net zero meant at a corporate or organizational level um which we we are now um getting close to having one and i'll cover that in a minute presumably many of the the local authorities had slightly different different definitions of of what was um how they defined net zero what was in scope what wasn't in scope and that kind of thing but no doubt we will all align um in due course um and the next slide please so here's a another pledge to net zero which was launched i think last year mainly at the environment sector i think the society for environment is behind this as is aima many people have signed up organizations have signed up to this so there's on signing up at the time the target was 1.5 or well below 2 degrees c carbon reduction scenario was required and the scope was was buildings and business travel flicking to the next slide please and although buildings aren't really my um area just to make you aware that the green building council has put together its definition of what a net zero building uh looks like and and the fact that it covers both the construction of the building and the operation of the building as well and as you can see offsetting of remaining carbon at the bottom at the bottom there okay and the next slide please um but what we were those in the sustainability team here at wsp anyway were very excited about was this new document which came out just last month um september published by their highly respected science-based targets initiative um called foundations for science-based net zero target setting in the corporate sector so this is just the beginning of a definition of what it means to be net zero as a corporate or as an organization and there's going to be further um guidance coming out um next year i think they're looking to to publish draft guidance before christmas and then i think next year it'll become firmed up but it's got a very uh useful definition there so firstly we need to achieve value chain emission reductions consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 and then we need to re neutralize any residual emissions by permanently removing an equivalent amount of co2 so those three points which i've highlighted in red are absolutely key and i'm going to dive into each of those separately in the um in the next in the remainder of the slide deck basically um but just to say that we need whilst we it talks about co2 there actually the net zero target is going to cover all ghg emissions greenhouse gas emissions not just carbon dioxide so as many of you will know we need to convert green ice gas emissions into a carbon dioxide equivalent but then when it comes to removing at the moment we can only really remove carbon dioxide from the from the atmosphere um not some of the other um greenhouse gases such as methane or if we if we can then the technology might not be as mature as those for carbon dioxide which is why it just talks about carbon dioxide for the emissions removal okay so going to the next slide then please so as i said we're going to drill into those three areas the one and a half degree science based targets the the value chain and the ghg removals or offsets and i'll take the uh the science-based targets first if you could flick over to the next slide so science based targeting this shift was established back in 2015 so not that long ago to answer the question what reduction target would support two at the time two degrees centimeters centigrade warming that was back in the day when that was considered a safe limit to global warming and essentially it's it looked at what carbon or the amount of greenhouse gases that could be um emitted over the the the next decades and looked at what sectors would be emitting um those of those greenhouse gases and then try to plot a reduction path broken down by the the different um sectors so it's got some very prestigious organizations um behind it such as the world resources institute which is also one of the backers of the greenhouse gas protocol uh carbon disclosure project now known as the the cdp and it's hq'd in washington d.c so i'm sure trump gives a uh a very generous write-up so flicking onto the next slide please so i just mentioned that it looks at the world very often through different sectors and in fact it's it's developed something called a sectoral decarbonization approach as one of its main methods so it might take a sector such as iron and steel or cement or power and look at the trajectory that that um that sector needs to um needs to decline by um to 2050 and that's the left-hand graph that you're looking at there and the black line is represented the sector so if you're company a and you're much higher than average then your reduction needs to be steeper and if your company c and you're actually your emissions intensity is lower than average then your your reduction doesn't have to be quite so um tough and then there's the absolute contraction so the not all sectors are covered by the sda approach so there's also the absolute contraction which is more of a a straight line approach to reducing your emissions and you could see that back in the day when 2 degrees c was seen as an acceptable level of global warming the reduction required was about 1.2 percent per annum um to hit well below two degrees c is about two and a half so about double that and then um for to hit 1.5 degrees centigrade of global warming then we're looking at around about four degrees sorry four percent per annum which over 12 years is about 50 percent so if you think of halving your carbon emissions over a 12 year period right next slide please ah sorry you've just um yeah that's okay i forgot there's a little animation in there next slide all the same okay so that was a quick counter through um the science-based targets we'll now look at what we mean by the value chain next slide please so the value chain is really your scope one your scope to and all your upstream scope 3 emissions and all your down streams scope 3 emissions um there is uh there's quite a lot to go out there the the 15 um that uh that i showed you just earlier um could we go to mentee and ask the next um the next question just will i put my skype on mute because someone's trying to skype me one second okay so this question is um which areas of your value chain contribute the most emissions if you could just let me know your um your organization type and what the source is doesn't have to be the um the scope number but just yeah as you're doing just business travel or use of sold products or whatever it might be great well i guess this is this is good that business travel is coming up um as a uh what you consider to be one of your hot spots given that you're um publishing and reporting on it so widely so that's that's good news at least that's consistent business travel and consulting yep yeah for us business travel is um is our is much larger than our offices this is a wsp uk but commuting is significant too good construction purchase goods and services yep that's where i do a lot of my work in um in the embodied carbon associated with steel and concrete and aluminium and asphalt and all that all those construction materials it's um it's big and beginning to get the attention it needs okay let's move on then um could you move to the back to the presentation and flick on to the next one and that's this is our last but one mentee question which is which scope three emissions should your organization be responsible for offsetting remembering that uh that diagram of upstream business travel commuting all that and downstream is more to do with the services and products sold so if you could flick back to mentee please taylor and let's just see how those questions are coming in for question six oh where is question six it's gone there we go thank you there we are thank you so upstream and downstream upstream only or don't don't know it depends and bear in mind we don't yet have the guidance on this from the science based uh organization um it'll be really interesting to see just how what their assumption is about the downstream emissions i think upstream we can take as as read um that we will probably all need to offset those would be very interesting just to see what they say about downstream okay thanks a lot um let's flick back then to the the presentation and um and flick onto the next slide please i just thought this was quite an interesting um graph it's slightly off topic but um you can see that this comes from the un environment programs emissions gap report and you can see the difference between the emissions which are produced within the territory if you like which is the thick line and then the um the emissions which come in from abroad due to imports and consumption so you can see the europe is reducing its emissions generally speaking but we don't want to forget that some of those emissions are coming in from outside the territory and the same with america in fact america's out of territory appears to be increasing and of course where's that coming from well largely china so um we might be reducing our territorial carbon footprint but we need to take account of the of our of our country's value chain if you like by including the stuff which is coming in from abroad okay next slide please so lastly let's look at uh ghg removals or really i guess co2 removals and offsets um next slide so we all know where the emissions are coming from it's from our offices and our factories and our our travel um and i've put that slide up about the un's um offset program which showed some of the ways that emissions can be avoided so there were a lot of cooking stove projects in there there was a wind farm and there's probably some solar fault voltaics in there so that all prevents emissions from escaping into the atmosphere and very often that is true for carbon capture and storage so if we had a steel plant for example which invested in carbon capture and storage that would just stop the emissions associated with the steel plant escaping into the atmosphere then to the right we've got emissions removal which is actually sucking it sucking co2 out of the atmosphere so afforestation and reforestation was on the un offset program so that's the the tree on the left but as we'll see in a moment there's going to be a lot of attention given to something called bex which is bio energy with ccs carbon capture and storage so that's growing growing the biomass the trees whatever it might be which sucks co2 out of the atmosphere but then we might um burn that to generate electricity for example but rather than letting those emissions go out into the atmosphere we um we trap them in as part of ccs and then there's dac which is direct air capture and that also needs to have carbon capture and storage so this is i've put some i think it's actually pizza wheels there but it's supposed to uh show what a direct air capture looks like which is lots and lots of fans i think there's a chemical process which um sucks the the co2 out of the air and then the air travels on its merry way but obviously that all that captured co2 has got to be stored somewhere so it doesn't get out again so so that's emissions removal next slide please and just for a bit of fun i thought i would try and estimate how much uh what area would be needed to um to offset by uh tree planting the emissions which are likely to be still coming from the uk in 2050 so these figures have come from the committee on climate change so we're we're currently around about 435 megatons per annum and by 2050 it should be down at about 90. now bearing in mind that one you have to plant a hectare of um of trees to take 350 tons out of the atmosphere and those trees have got to be left there for 800 years to let them grow to full maturity and take as much carbon out of the atmosphere carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as possible so that's the last mente question for you then um is um what area of greater london would need to be uh planted each year to take that 90 megatons out of the atmosphere i think i've rechecked and rechecked my calculations here so i hope i'm right but be interesting to see what you think so is it the same size as greater london which would be a hundred percent or is it more than that or less than that thanks mike we've also got about five minutes left for questions as well some really interesting questions coming through so um okay thank you yeah i'm on the last last couple of slides excellent stuff thanks mike thank you thanks for the prompt okay good so um i reckon it's about 160 which is why if we go back and so good estimates there if we go back to the um the main slides and move on which is why you can see that those removals are mainly going to be done by becks rather than tree planting okay right next slide please and you can see that there's a great differential between those three modes of um of carbon removal at the moment and i would expect um those the becks and the dax to come down and probably the tree planting to to increase right next slide please thanks so i've just tried to summarize here what i see is the difference between carbon neutral and net zero you can be carbon neutral now if you just buy enough offsets whereas net zero you is more of a medium and long term ambition i think the scope is roughly the same the reduction target is definitely different they're net zero you have to have a 1.5 degree size based targets but carbon neutral there is no required target and in net zero you have to reduce your absolute emissions whereas carbon neutral could be absolute or intensity and the offsets for net zero must be removal offsets whereas for carbon neutral it could be avoidance or ram or removal last slide thanks just be a bit remiss of me um given this is the major project association not to mention pas 2080 which is a guide on how to manage carbon in major infrastructure projects and has this handy little carbon reduction hierarchy um to the right which um given the other time we've got uh i won't go through but it's probably the subject of a a separate presentation i am done thank you very much for listening i'm sorry for going on a little bit i know we haven't got much time for questions but i'll happily try and take questions if you um if you have any excellent thanks thanks very much mike in a brilliant brilliant presentation quite timely now that also i think solar is the cheapest electrician in history as of today or this week so really really interesting stuff um we haven't got time to go through all the questions um so what i'll do is we'll send the recording out of this you can either get in touch with mike and i'll also try and send um directly some responses for for the questions but just to go straight into them and we'll try and get through a couple um so yeah so my one of the first questions with many of us working from home now um should working from home emissions be included in the scope 3 emissions in the value chain and should this be part of the annual carbon report good question yeah the greenhouse gas protocols scope 3 guidance actually has it as an optional part of of the reporting but bear in mind uh that was put together before anybody had heard of covid19 so i think it should um be included if you've got substantial numbers of people working from home and we're we're trying to we wsp are in the throes of updating our annual commuting survey where we um where we try and uh estimate our carbon emissions for compute commuting to also include working from home it'd be interesting just to see how significant that is but i think it can't be ignored if these working arrangements um become permanent thanks george yeah okay we've got another one here about sort of the offsetting side of things so um how are offsetting costs likely to change in the future i presume that's also pricing as well yeah good question um i think they are yes i suggested that they they're likely to change i think the cost of just growing trees especially um in in europe or the populated countries of europe such as the uk will steadily increase as both demand increases because everybody's going net zero and needs to offset but also as space um begins so free space begins to decline um it suggests that prices will will increase whereas the technology behind becks let's hope will um we'll see uh cost reductions so a bit like photovoltaics and wind farms you know when it was new it was very expensive but now it's it's uh it's getting cheaper and cheaper so um i at one point they'll um they'll cross over and becks will become the uh the go-to which presumably is why the committee on climate change has um assumed that that we're going to be mainly looking at becks by 2050. and then our final question just before before we wrap up um and keep it fairly straightforward so this one is how can we assure all our net zero targets and measurements are aligned um is there a common framework i presume the race to zero could be one but yes uh that's very good yeah i well i think um it's going to everybody will um start to um go towards the the science-based targets um net zero definition so we've now got the beginnings of a definition um that you know it has to be value chain it's got to be removals it's got to be 1.5 degrees c what we don't yet know is the sort of the nitty-gritty about okay you say value chain but in this industry or in that in that sector exactly how far down the value chain are you expecting this to go so i think that's um that's going to be the tricky one excellent stuff um well if we go into the final slide and i just sort of so big thank you to to everyone who's um who's joined today and um just to let you know that we have a couple more lined up so we're doing like i said at the start so one a month so our next one's on the 5th of november and that's looking in sort of the lockdown learnings particularly for sustainability leaders um and that'll be david simons our head of uk sustainability who will be leading on that one um and then on the 2nd of sept december we've got uh measuring reporting your greenhouse gas emissions so um james tapson will be covering the the new uk monetary reporting secr and the ins and outs and that and sort of simplifying it as much as possible um and then going forward in the new year we've got acom taking on the mini series um so yeah i just want to say again a big thank you to also the major project association for for hosting these and um yeah hopefully and thank you to mike as well and hopefully to see you all the next one thanks very much [Music] you

Channel: Major Projects Association Knowledge Community

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Id: caEb7fD1FQM

Length: 44min 42sec (2682 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020